I haven't posted any new coding projects in a very long time, but I've been gradually chipping away at a concept that longtime readers will know by its working (joke) title of "Walmart Toyhouse," from the character management website Toyhouse. In theory, Walmart Toyhouse is a self-hosted character management script with enough automation that it's easy to maintain without being unnecessarily dense or hard to customize. I say "in theory" because progress on the code stalled for a while.

For me, the ideal character management system needs the following components:

• All information is pulled from a central database
• Page templates that you can reuse and reformat for multiple characters
• Some form of organization (folders)
• Galleries auto-populate from one central image database

It's not a complex idea on paper, but I didn't make much progress on it because I got stuck on implementing stuff like custom fields into a database. I also thought I had to code a browser interface for the whole thing, and that's a can of worms that I didn't have the energy to open (especially for a project with this many moving parts). So Walmart Toyhouse has been languishing in development hell for a very long time.

Cut to December 2024. I saw a post from Armaina floating the idea of a PHP and CSV character repository, and it singlehandedly solved nearly every problem I was having with my original conception of this code.

Image gallery frameworks! They're everywhere! And yet I haven't found even one that doesn't suck. They're clunky at best and inaccessible at worst.

Here is a sampler of issues I've encountered on various image galleries:

• Requires Javascript to work (clunky, inaccessible)
• Doesn't have alt text (inaccessible)
• Lightboxes (clunky, usually inaccessible, probably requires Javascript)
• Just a bunch of thumbnails that link to image files (inaccessible)
• Images open in a tooltip (worse than lightboxes in every conceivable way)

There must be a better way. Right???